I'm pretty happy with the experience on Lemmy so far as I joined even before the blackouts started happening. The trigger was the dumpster fire of an AMA with the CEO. I tried kbin first because it's supposed to be newer and more interoperable with other federated platforms but I found the instance I was on wouldn't properly load content from Lemmy and I couldn't find a kbin Android app. So I'll be here for the time being.
During the shitstorm on Twitter and the exodus to Mastodon, I tried out Mastodon and felt that it was a similarly welcoming experience. But I kept reading comments on Reddit that the Fediverse was too complicated and it was too hard to find people to follow because you needed their username as well as their instance to find them. I hope people have realised that it's not that much harder during this current Reddit shitshow.
Everyone understands that Reddit/Lemmy/kbin is built on community, and the growth of this community has been fostered by moderators, not Reddit itself.
So my question to any subreddit moderators is: Is there something about the Fediverse that would prevent you from moving your community off Reddit? It seems pretty clear that people will try Reddit alternatives even before their favourite subreddits have moved. Users are engaged with the communities that you have built and loyal to the 3rd party app developers and we don't give a fuck about Reddit as an organisation.
Discussion open to everyone, but curious to know if any moderators are also using Lemmy.
Thanks. Yes I understand where you're coming from. But I also agree with your other responder. I wouldn't be too quick to underestimate people. I'm not white, I'm over 35 and in a sexual minority.
I think that if someone has made the effort to learn how to use Reddit because they were able to find a community they belong to outside of Facebook or Twitter, understanding Federation isn't a huge learning curve if you're already using email.
Even if you're a non technical user, there are enough of the massive subreddits that went dark that these people wouldn't be able to easily ignore what was happening, or be at least mildly interested in why it was happening.
To me, the changes with Reddit's APIs simply highlight the disconnect between Reddit as an organisation vs Reddit as a platform for building community.
Maybe it's a naive view, but other than the moderation tools, the reason that communities have grown to be safe places is because of the unpaid work of moderators, not because of Reddit's leadership. If users appreciated why moderators and 3rd party app devs are pissed off, they would understand that the power of their community comes from the bottom up and moderators hold a lot of influence.
Regardless, it will be interesting to watch moderators wait for other moderators to decide which should come first, the chicken or the egg.